Mason, 8, (yellow shirt, not shown Rhett) enjoyed canoeing on the beautiful waters at YMCA Camp Cristina this summer.
Jamie Kaplan-Wilder has been a member of the Y for years, signing her kids up for after-care and traditional camps, but was excited to try something different this summer.
“I just happened to drive by the South Tampa Y and saw the pink bus out there. And was like whoa, (YMCA) Camp Cristina has bus service. This is fantastic,” she says. “And so, we just looked into it and it was great. The reason why I wanted to do it was because it was something I could send Mason, 8, and Rhett, 13, his older step-brother, together.”
YMCA Camp Cristina is a 65-acre outdoor center which hosts day camps for rising 1st through 10th graders. The natural world provides an almost "fool-proof" place to create new memories, gain a new vocabulary of experiences, and new friends to share them with.
She says the bus happened to be one of her children’s favorite parts of camp.
“(Mason) was telling me how they do songs on the bus and they have a play list each kid gets to pick a song everyday they want to play. I’m sure with traffic at that time it’s probably a 45-minute drive so that was kind of the fun part,” she says. “I was worried the bus might be boring but he said the bus gets them pumped up when they play the music and, on the ride back, they’re all zonked.”
Jamie says both of them have a little bit of stage fright when it comes to meeting new people but Rhett made 10 new friends on his first day there and Mason even reconnected with a buddy he was with from infancy through VPK graduation.
“He came home one day ‘mom, mom, mom, mom, mom! You’re never going to believe it. Cooper’s in my camp! He was so excited because those two kids were just like they were elbow buddies for four years. Which is half of his life. So, this was really neat.”
And her older one wasn’t bored.
“Thirteen-year-olds don’t really get excited about much, so to have them come home and tell all of those stories and be that excited as a parent- that excites me,” she says.
YMCA Camp Cristina is more than an outdoor experience.
“It feels so much like the camps we went to as kids, where we stayed in cabins and built lifelong friendships. I'm so happy we took the plunge this summer and cannot wait to send them back,” she says. “With Camp Cristina, our boys come home with a new adventure, a new story, a new game victory, a new challenge they've overcome...every single day.”
The Y served more than 19,000 children at its camps this summer.
“The biggest thing for me too is (the Y) makes it very accommodating,” Jamie says. “I feel blended families are tough. Two in the same household is even tougher and they make it a lot easier on us as parents, which is nice.”